Hey there, Mark is of course right when he says that no one outside Northern Ireland cares about the difference between the ‘official ‘ unionists (or their name, since the ‘official’ went out years ago!) and the DUP. Lots of people in Northern Ireland don’t care either and want a united unionist party which can ally with English, Scottish and Welsh parties as our interests coincide. That’s quite a traditional British position, do you not think?

Anyway, for people like me stuck in the sticks with unrepentent sectarian murderers failing to represent us by refusing to go to Westminister, the greater truth is that it’s better to be represented by any respectable unionist than any nationalist. Sorry for bothering you with trifles – may providence smile on you lot inyour battle with the climatologists!

Mark Wilson

Well, I wouldn’t call the disintegration of the Mother of Parliaments a “trifle”. (I wouldn’t call Michael E Mann a climatologist, either, but that’s another matter.) You allude to Sinn Féin members who won’t go to Westminster because they refuse to take their oath of allegiance to the Queen. But you don’t need to steer clear of Westminster to decline allegiance in a broader sense. When the Kingdom of Scotland votes as overwhelmingly for the SNP as the (southern and western parts of the) Kingdom of Ireland did for Sinn Féin in 1918, they too are refusing allegiance to the existing political arrangements.”

This is in reference to the latest revision to the Clinton story – her claim that all of her grandparents came to America as immigrants. In fact (if Hillary will forgive the word), two of her grandparents were born in Illinois, one in Pennsylvania, and the fourth, brought here as a child, is the only immigrant. As so often with Hillary, one is struck by the sheer strangeness of the lie: What’s the point of it? Is she try to qualify for amnesty under the DREAM act? Is the first-female-president thing going nowhere so she’s shooting for the first Undocumented President? Even as pandering, it’s hard to see the logic of it: granted that the overwhelming majority of Illegal-Americans going to the polls will be voting Democrat, it surely can’t be that high a percentage that it’s worth White-Outting the family birth certificates and replacing “State of Illinois” with “República de Colombia”, is it?

Oh, don’t worry about it:

” Her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience and, as a result she has always thought of them as immigrants,” a Clinton spokesman told BuzzFeed News.

Could happen to anyone. Just like Chelsea’s little girl – when she’s running for President in 2040 – will remember her grandmother always speaking about the sniper experience and as a result always thought of Gran’ma Hill as a sniper.

Ah, well. All this week we’ve been revisiting some Hillary favorites from the Steyn archives, mostly from the turn of the century. But here from her last presidential campaign is my syndicated column of March 29th 2008, with some reflections on the Clintons’ relationship with the truth: “

” “Ignore the noise – Clinton will win in 2016,” we are assured by a columnist in Hillary’s journalistic namesakeThe Hill. “The email flap will be gone soon enough.”

That’s probably the way to bet. Rightie pundits are going on about government-issue Blackberries, insecure servers, federal record-keeping, the law, national security, peripheral stuff like that. Leftie pundits are saying: yawn, nobody cares, it’s never gonna catch fire, give it up. Everyone implicitly agrees that Hillary did something she shouldn’t and that her justification for doing so is ridiculous. The only disagreement is whether it makes any difference. The Hill‘s Fernando Espuelas says no:

Clinton has a built-in advantage — her gender… Some percentage of Americans, likely a large one, would like to cast a historic vote. When polling points to Americans wanting “change,” what bigger change than a woman as president?

A change to a competent citizen-executive whose administration spends within its means, ceases obstructing economic growth and middle-class prosperity, and restores American influence in the world?

Oh, well. One takes his point: Most other citizens of developed and not-so-developed societies cast those “historic votes” long ago – Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, India, Dominica, Jamaica, Guyana, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Israel, Turkey, Portugal, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, Transnistria… At the time of those “historic votes” on a good half of that list, “gender” was not “a built-in advantage” but a built-in disadvantage that skilled and nimble female candidates had to be exceptional to overcome. If I follow Mr Espuelas correctly, he’s saying that America is getting round to its “historic vote” so late that “gender” is now such an advantage that any old female candidate can be dragged across the finish line, no matter how shopworn, wooden, charmless, tin-eared and corrupt.

Maybe. But, even so, Hillary Clinton is still a severe test of that thesis. Charles Krauthammer detects “Early-Onset Clinton Fatigue“. Whether that is yet afflicting the electorate, it certainly seems to have gripped the candidate. At that press conference, Hillary seemed to be going through the motions. Flush with Saudi cash and a well-oiled shakedown Rolodex, Clinton Worldwide Inc has no reason not to run for president, but apparently no compelling reason to run. When the candidate runs into trouble, grizzled drooling attack dogs from the Nineties – Lanny Davis, James Carville – are loosed from their chains and limp dutifully from the Old Pooch Home to bare their remaining fang for their mistress. Is there anyone new, young, talented willing to defend Hillary? I mean, other than Huma, the only woman in America whose marriage rivals the exhibitionist creepiness of the Clintons in their heyday.”

So the electorate is yearning to cast a “historic” vote ? We’ve already seen how well voting with that criteria in mind works out . God help us if the masses fall for that again .

HUGH HEWITT: Now we’ve got a lot to cover. We’ve got to cover llamas, the Oscars and the Islamic State, not to mention Chris Christie, so I’ve got to go fast. Did you by chance watch the llama drama on Fox today?

MARK STEYN: (laughing) Yeah, the llamas on the llam. You can joke, Hugh, but I think the llamapocalypse is upon us. I looked out in the yard, out of the window at the yard about 20 minutes ago, and there were just nine llamas there, and I thought that’s unusual for New Hampshire in winter. I just looked out the window now, and there’s 17 llamas between me and the car. So I think, you know, this is some Planet of the Llamas…

HH: (laughing)

MS: In the words of Charlton Heston, ‘Take your hands off me you damned, dirty llama.’ This is how it begins.

We also discussed Dennis Miller’s observation that the Oscar statuette looks like Vladimir Putin, and Lady Gaga’s Academy performance of “The Sound Of Music”:

MS: Well, I don’t think Lady Gaga is actually a bad singer of those kinds of songs. I rather regret that she got mixed up with Tony Bennett, because he’ll duet with anybody. I mean… he’s done a double CD with my plumber. I didn’t know it. My plumber was working in the room for 15 minutes, and Tony Bennett swung by, and they recorded seven numbers together. Tony Bennett releases three duet albums, in the course of this conversation, he’ll have released another duet album. You’ve probably done a duet album with Tony Bennett yourself, haven’t you? “

” The US media have had a fit of the vapors over Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama does not love America. As the Instapundit says, their reaction suggests that Giuliani hit a nerve.

For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I’m growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That’s why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.

So please don’t insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current “leader of the free world” is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

For example, he has spent most of this week hosting an international conference on something called “violent extremism”. Whatever may be said of Munich, Chamberlain never hosted a three-day summit on “rearmament” in general whose entire purpose was to deny that “rearmament” and “Germany” were in any way connected. Yet that is exactly the message the United States government has just offered to the world – in between such eccentric side spectacles as Marie Harf, star of the hilarious new comedy Geopolitically Blonde, explaining her jobs-for-jihadis program, and the new hombre in charge of the planet’s mightiest military machine having his woman felt up on camera by Joe Biden. Now there’s a message to send to the misogynists of Burqastan about what happens when you let the missuses out of their body bags.”

Mr Steyn continues …

” But hey, what’s so odd about that? “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to “the fabric of our country” for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody’s fabric but instead tends to unravel it – as it’s doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

But President Obama knows better than you. So he organized a summit dedicated to creating and promoting a self-invented phantom enemy. Conveniently enough, the main problem with “violent extremists” is that its principal victims are Muslims. No, no, I don’t mean the thousands of Muslims being slaughtered, beheaded, burned alive, raped, sold into sex slavery, etc, etc, in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, and so on. The Muslims most at risk are right here in America. Just ask Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson:

We in the administration and the government should give voice to the plight of Muslims living in this country and the discrimination that they face. And so I personally have committed to speak out about the situation that very often people in the Muslim community in this country face. The fact that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the Islamic faith is one about peace and brotherhood.”

Mark Steyn reminds us of the similarities between jihadists and climate-change alarmists. Both are fanatical. Both hew to ideologies that brook no dissent or criticism. Both go ballistic — albeit in markedly different ways — when some “blasphemer” has the audacity to make withering fun of them and their orthodoxies. Most crucially, however, is the fact that both are control freaks who seek to micro-manage our lives, the climate-change alarmists via onerous environmental regulations, the jihadists via Sharia law.

” The broker America gets, the longer its presidential motorcade gets. If you don’t got it, flaunt it, baby! But President-in-Waiting Hillary Rodham Clinton is already giving out signals that a mere 40-car motorcade may no longer be enough. This week she gave a speech in Saskatoon, which is a town in Saskatchewan, which is a province of Canada. The speech was for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, which is “under investigation from the United States for helping wealthy Americans offshore money in the bank’s Caribbean accounts to avoid paying federal taxes”. I’m on CIBC’s side on that one: By comparison with other western nations, Americans labor under a regime of ever tighter banking constraints that are a disgrace to a supposedly free people.

So if she wants to cozy up to foreign banksters (as they say in Britain), you go, girl! Nevertheless:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a couple paid speeches in Canada yesterday. She was reportedly accompanied by 65 agents of the United States Secret Service to at least one of the events.

The agents were presumably on hand to help keep the former first lady safe…

It’s unclear what part, if any, of the security tab was picked up by Clinton — and what part was paid for by U.S. taxpayers. “

Just a day after the Charlie Hebdo shooting left 12 dead and had politicians calling for the country to unite, a row between politicians broke out after the National Front were not invited to take part in Sunday’s rally for “national unity” in Paris.

In the most recent national election in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front won. So the national unity rally excludes the most popular national party. That seems likely to work.

~The French establishment is co-opting these brave men’s deaths for their own purposes, and for the most part the world’s media are helping them get away with it. I spent much of Thursday on TV and radio, and my irritation with the dismal #JeSuisCharlie campaign increased as the day wore on. The self-flattering evasiveness of all those cartoonists around the world offering lame variations of “the pen is mightier than the sword” was especially feeble. The cartoon at right, by Chimulus (Michel Faizant) of Le Nouvel Observateur, at least confrontsthe ugly truth of Wednesday morning, rather than tippy-toeing around it:

Mohammed publishes a comic strip on the death of Charb.

With plenty of boxes.

The only problem? Chimulus drew that two years ago – December 31st 2012. This week, when his remarkably prescient cartoon came true, his courage deserted him.

~As to those TV and radio appearances, first up was with Joyce Kaufman at 850 WFTL in Florida, which you can hear by clicking here. It was a lively ride: as Scaramouche says, “Made my day.” “

Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.

Yeah, right. I would use my standard line on these occasions – “Allahu Akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here” – but it’s not quite as funny when the streets are full of cowards, phonies and opportunists waving candles and pencils and chanting “Je suis Charlie.” Because if you really were Charlie, if you really were one of the 17 Frenchmen and women slaughtered in the name of Allah in little more than 48 hours, you’d utterly despise a man who could stand up in public and utter those words.”

In terms of global temperature, I expect the hiatus to continue at last another decade, but won’t pretend to predict year to year variations. In terms of U.S. politics, I expect the Republican dominated Senate to hold more congressional hearings related to climate/energy issues. I don’t expect much to be accomplished in the Paris UNFCCC meeting. And finally I predict that Michael Mann’s lawsuit against NRO/CEI/Steyn won’t be resolved in 2015.

I’ll come back to that last one – personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mann’s suit against me lasts as long as “the hiatus” and then some. And I’ll return to the first one, too. But let’s start with that third one – the upcoming Paris meeting of the UNFCCC. When I first started seeing headlines about the Pope pushing for action on climate change, I assumed the College of Climate Cardinals had had a whip round and decided to buy Michael E Mann a funny hat and a big balcony to make up for the implosion of his self-conferred Nobel Prize. But no, this isn’t His Hockiness but His Holiness – the real, actual Pope:

This March, following a visit to the Philippines, Pope Francis will publish an encyclical on the environment that insiders say will tackle the issue of global warming head on. Pope Francis is hoping to have some impact when world leaders meet to discuss climate change in Paris next year…

So the pontiff wants to get a piece of the climate-change action. Do carbon offsets qualify for papal indulgences?”

” Speaking of North Korea, we were subject to a denial-of-service attack yesterday. But from Iran. Who says there’s no axis of evil?

At any rate, if you experienced difficulties with our home page and various other corners of the site, we apologize for the inconvenience. I’m happy to say, as we hit those last-minute Christmas shopping days, that the retail end of the SteynOnline cornucopia withstood the assault and remained open for Yuletide business. But there’s gonna be a lot more of this in the years ahead. And whether the Internet as we know it will survive is an open question.

~I’ve spent much of the last couple of days on the radio with some of my favorite interviewers. You can hear how my take on the Sony/Kim Jong-Un showdown developed as the scale of Hollywood’s capitulation became clear. Let’s start with Toronto’s Number One morning man, John Oakley. John and I also discussed the other big stories of the week – the jihadist-waiting-to-happen in Sydney and the slaughter of innocents in a Peshawar schoolhouse, Click below to listen: ” (see above)

” The problem with a victim culture is that so many people want to join the ranks of victimhood that eventually you run short of oppressors. As I say in my new book (personally autographed copies of which make a Christmas gift your loved one will cherish forever), Elizabeth Warren is the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of White-Out, but a dubious claim to be one 32nd Cherokee was enough to persuade Harvard Law School to promote her as their first “woman of color”. No wonder so many Democrats prefer her to Hillary: The first “woman of color” in the Oval Office! The first Cherokee!

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a great-great-great-grandmother who’s listed as Cherokee in the online transcription of an 1894 marriage application, what do you do? Lena Dunham is an upper-middle-class child of white privilege who’s had a charmed life, but she’s a victim, too. According to her new memoir, she was raped by “Barry”, the token conservative at Oberlin. The real-life Barry the Conservative denies raping her, and Random House has been forced to issue a statement “regretting the confusion” and to cover his legal bills, which he’d been paying for by “crowd-funding”. The publisher couldn’t resist a parting sneer:

We are offering to pay the fees Mr. Minc has billed his client to date. Our offer will allow Mr. Minc and his client to donate all of the crowd-funding raised to not-for-profit organizations assisting survivors of rape and sexual assault.

Because even if Barry the Conservative never raped Lena Dunham, odds are he’s raped someone else, right? As Ann Coulter put it:

How about donating it to organizations that assist survivors of false rape accusations?

Rather than an epidemic of campus rape, there seems to be some sort of psychological inversion of “white flight”, in which untold numbers feel the need to flee their bland middle-class suburbs and pitch up in edgier ghettos. You’ll have noticed the recent uptick in news of the transgendered – indeed, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, author of the now discredited University of Virginia gang-rape story, was previously reporting on the epidemic of trans rape (Ms Erdely appears to be the Rape Correspondent of Rolling Stone). I note there are some three times as many male-to-female transgenders as there are female-to-male. So all that “gender fluidity” is a vast net transfer from the male brutalizer sector to the female victim sector. At some point it would seem likely to become a flood. After all, it’s not so difficult to imagine, a fake gang-rape story or three down the line, elite universities requiring gender reassignment as a condition of continued male admission. In some sense, the swollen ranks of the transgendered seem to have intuited that the jig is up for guys. Might as well check out of the guy business entirely. I’m thinking of pitching Marvel Comics a new superhero group featuring a transwoman, an ambigender, a pangender, an intergender, a bigender and a 2-spirited called Ex-Men.

We are all ex-men now. The sadly misnamed Cavalier Daily of Charlottesville has a highly non-cavalier story about how “Jackie”, the “victim” of the University of Virginia “gang” “rape”, is owed a debt of gratitude for “pulling back the curtain on rape“: “

” I’ve borrowed Kathy Shaidle’s headline because I think that sums up John Derbyshire’s column better than the one he and his editors chose: “The Impotent Eagle.” It’s not that we are incapable of doing anything, it’s that we can’t rouse ourselves to do anything.

‘I think that withdrawing birthright citizenship from the children of illegals would be a good move, and highly appropriate. I don’t see why we couldn’t do it going forward. But of course we won’t, because we can’t do anything.’

It was that closing phrase that stuck in my mind. We can’t do anything. It’s so damn true.

John focuses on the big headlines: the Afghan war… immigration… law enforcement in Ferguson… America can’t win wars, enforce its borders, prevent looting. He could have added a bazillion others: build a flood barrier that prevents one measly not-so-Superstorm Sandy ruining people’s lives for years after… replace the dingy decrepit dump of LaGuardia with an airport that isn’t a total embarrassment to one of the world’s great cities… upgrade the most primitive bank cards in the developed world… stiffen Republican spines to come up with plans for debt reduction that kick in before the middle of the century…

But I’m increasingly struck by how “we can’t do anything” applies to all the small stuff, too. If you’ve ever spent hours on the phone going round in circles with your health insurer over some nothing little thing, you’ll be aware that “we can’t do anything” is not a monopoly of the big geopolitical strategists. The whole joint seems to be seizing up, and it bothers me. Americans now have less health-care freedom and less banking freedom than many Continental Europeans. But let’s not get all comparative about this. In absolute terms – and certainly in comparison with the America that was – too much of daily life has become over-complicated and over-regulated and over-sclerotic, and too many people are content to string along with it. “

” I spent Black Friday behind the Golden EIB Microphone sitting in for Rush on America’s Number One radio show. It was a fun ride today and we discussed many things – from immigration to ISIS to impeachment – but we also talked about a man from the Colorado town of Fruitvale (seriously), who’s been charged with a felony for threatening two police officers with a banana:

Anyway, the big takeaway from this is it’s now illegal to point a banana at law enforcement. As Harry Belafonte sang:

~If you’re wondering about that Mark Twain event I mentioned on the show today, it’s on Monday December 8th in Hartford, Connecticut just across the street from the Mark Twain House. Your local Rush station WTIC is one of the co-presenters of the event, and NPR’s Scott Simon will be quizzing me. You can find full details and reserve tickets here. “

But it turns out they don’t. Not to him. You gotta hand it to the guy: It would be hard to devise a more open expression of contempt for the will of the people than what he’s just done. An election was held. His party lost, badly. And, without waiting for the new guys even to take their seats, in the so-called “lame-duck session” (an unnecessary carbuncular proceduralism most developed nations manage to do without), the President tells the – oh, what’s the word? – “citizenry”, “Hey, thanks for taking the trouble to drive to the polling station the other day. Leave your name at the desk and if we need you for cheering extras at my photo-op we’ll get back to you.” You can change legislators. Meanwhile, he’ll change the legislation.

I’m getting weary of the monarchical comparisons, which are a bit of an insult to real monarchs. The Obama model seems to owe more to Judge Dredd, the popular comic-book figure with the power to arrest, convict, sentence and execute as he does what’s necessary to bring hope and change to a dystopian megalopolis. Likewise, President Dredd: “He is the Law, and you’d better believe it!” A contempt for the people and for constitutional and legal restraints is what ties the President’s actions on Thursday night to Eric Holder’s corrupt justice department to Lois Lerner’s corrupt revenue agency to Jonathan Gruber’s corrupt health commissariat (merely to skim the surface of the most recent additions to the unending Obama-scandals document dump).

To express common-or-garden contempt for the will of the people, Obama could have simply repealed another handful of inconvenient paragraphs from Obamacare or made Lois Lerner Attorney-General, but the form of contempt he chose is especially exquisite: “legalizing” millions of foreign law-breakers and setting them on the path to US citizenship. The chief of state has heard the voice of the people and his message to them is: “Yeah, whatever, I can always get another people. Hey, here comes five million or so right now, plus another ten million in chain-migration relatives down the road…” “

” The Blaze’s Benjamin Weingarten interviewed Mark about his new book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn. Along the way they also discussed Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, whose smug, confident contempt for the people Steyn suggests is the acme of liberal technocrat condescension. Lots of other subjects, big and small, are covered in this conversation. We think you’ll enjoy it. Just click below to listen: “

” I wouldn’t be surprised if Tom Steyer, Big Climate’s Daddy Warmbucks, woke up this morning with the all-time worst dose of “climate depression“. Sample headline:

Tom Steyer Spent $74 Million on the Election. He Didn’t Get Much to Show for It.

He blew through that $74 million in order to make “climate change” the winning wedge issue for beleaguered Democrats. How’d that work out?

Colorado was a prime battleground for Steyer’s Super PAC and other environmentalist groups, but Gardner bested Udall by a 4.2 percent margin on Tuesday.

Udall was one of the few vulnerable Senate Democratic incumbents who refused to publicly back the Keystone XL pipeline, opposition to which was Steyer’s litmus test for his sizable financial support… Steyer’s Super PAC poured money into the Colorado Senate race, the bulk of which was used to attack Gardner.

NextGen Climate Action, one of the election cycle’s most active and well-funded Super PACs, spentmore than $5.5 million in the race, nearly 15 percent of all outside spending on Udall’s behalf.

” The eminent historian Max Hastings and I have not always seen eye to eye. (Example:

I have spent a lifetime resisting my father’s prejudice, that men who affect beards should be regarded with the gravest suspicion. Yet every time I read the rantings of Mark Steyn about what he perceives as decadent European hostility towards the US, I have to fight down an ignoble sensation that daddy was right.

All over the world, from Vimy Ridge and El Alamein to Rangoon and Rorke’s Drift, stand memorials to British war dead, most of them places of pilgrimage for descendants and tourists.

Future travellers, however, will find no such proud relic at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. When the Army lowered the Union flag there on Sunday, our memorial — etched with hundreds of names of the fallen — had been dismantled and flown home.

Had it remained in war-torn Helmand province, it seemed certain to face desecration and destruction. There could be no more vivid manifestation of the failure of Britain’s Afghan mission.

In my new book, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, there is a section called “September 12th”. Beginning with my first sight of “Ground Zero”, it’s a series of snapshots that chart over the years the remorseless evaporation of western will, descending bumpily in its latter stretch through our reliance on drones, the disgrace of Benghazi, and some thoughts from me on the man at the Trebil border crossing between Jordan and Iraq – contrasting the US soldier who glanced at my Canadian passport when I crossed a few weeks after the fall of Saddam with the Islamic State goon who occupies the post today. That’s a profound image of total defeat. But so too are those last soldiers dismantling the British war memorial. As I wrote two-and-a-half years ago:

In the last couple of months, two prominent politicians of different nations visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to me for Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the fortifications, a mini-West has been built in a cheerless land: There are Coke machines and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the gates, a man can climb out of the full RoboCop and stop pretending he enjoys three cups of tea with the duplicitous warlords, drug barons, and pederasts who pass for Afghanistan’s ruling class. The visiting Western dignitary is cautiously shuttled through outer and inner perimeters, and reminded that even here there are areas he would be ill-advised to venture unaccompanied, and tries to banish memories of his first tour all those years ago when aides still twittered optimistically about the possibility of a photo op at a girls’ schoolroom in Jalalabad or an Internet start-up in Kabul. “

” The guy who took a hatchet to a New York policeman was apparently a “lone wolf”, just like the guy who took a double-barreled shotgun to a Canadian soldier was a “lone-wolf”. Earlier today, I swung by Varney & Co on Fox Business to discuss the umpteenth member of Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves:

” This term ‘lone wolf’ is a cop-out…the idea that they somehow have to have a membership card in Islamic State or in al Qaeda for it to be official, fully-credentialed terror, like getting a hairdresser’s license in New York State is completely preposterous” he stated.

Steyn added that the rhetoric of “lone wolf” terrorists allows those who do not want to admit that radical Islam is a problem to brush off terror as isolated incidents, saying “all jihad is local. That actually suits them, to say, ‘oh no this is just some mentally ill guy in Ottawa and this is another guy who’s a bit goofy in New York and there’s no connection between the two.’ Because otherwise you have to treat it like your other big story. You have to treat it like ideological Ebola and you have to stop the infection…“

” Moore is a municipality that lies between Norman, where a dear friend of mine lives, and Oklahoma City, which I know reasonably well. I can’t claim to know Moore other than to drive through, but I do remember the water tower emblazoned with “Moore – Home of Toby Keith”. Can’t get more American than that, can you?

Colleen Hufford was born in 1960. Life is full of grim twists and cruel vicissitudes, but in mid-20th century America it would not have occurred to anyone that one needed to worry about going to work and being beheaded by a colleague. Yet that’s what happened to Ms Hufford on Thursday: She turned up for her job at at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, and Alton Alexander Nolen decapitated her.

Why would he do that? Well, as the initial reports were at pains to assure us, it’s nothing to do with terrorism. That’s true, in the sense that Mr Nolen is not a card-carrying member of an officially credentialed state-recognized terrorism-provider such as ISIS or al-Qaeda. It’s true in the sense that he’s not on any official US Department of Homeland Security terror watch list, because, under the geniuses running American national security, that honor is reserved for my fellow Hillsdale cruiser Steve Hayes. And, of course, it’s also true in the sense that Mr Nolen is a recent convert to Islam and, as David Cameron and Barack Obama and many others are ever more eager to emphasize, terrorism is nothing to do with Islam. Mr Nolen had the Muslim greeting “As-salamu Alaikum” – “Peace be upon you” – tattooed upon his abdomen. And he’d tried, without success, to persuade his co-workers at Vaughan Foods to convert to Islam. So he wasn’t just mildly Islamic in the nothing-to-do-with-terrorism sense, he was super-Islamic in the really-totally-no-terrorism-to-see-here sense.

This morning the Police Chief, Thomas Jackson, released security-camera shots of the late Michael Brown apparently stealing a five-dollar box of cigarillos from a convenience store. So the 18-year old shot dead by Chief Jackson’s officer was no longer a “gentle giant” en route to college but just another crappy third-rate violent teen n’er-do-well.

This afternoon, the chief gave a second press conference. Why would he do that? Well, he’d somehow managed to create the impression in his first press conference that the officer who killed Mr Brown was responding to the robbery. In fact, that was not the case. The Ferguson policeman was unaware that Brown was a robbery suspect at the time he encountered him and shot him dead. Which is presumably why Chief Jackson was leaned on to give his second press conference and tidy up the mess from the first. So we have an officer who sees two young men, unwanted for any crime, walking down the middle of the street and stops his cruiser. Three minutes later one of them is dead.

On the other hand, Jackson further confused matters by suggesting that he noticed Brown had cigars in his hand and might be the suspect.

It’s important, when something goes wrong, to be clear about what it is that’s at issue. Talking up Michael Brown as this season’s Trayvonesque angel of peace and scholarship was foolish, and looting stores in his saintly memory even worse. But this week’s pictures from Ferguson, such as the one above, ought to be profoundly disquieting to those Americans of a non-looting bent. “

Mr Steyn addresses the mess that is Ferguson , Missouri . Read it all .

” In May 2011, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria wrote a column headlined “Al Qaeda Is Over“:

The truth is this is a huge, devastating blow to al Qaeda, which had already been crippled by the Arab Spring. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of al Qaeda in any meaningful sense of the word.

Al Qaeda is not an organization that commands massive resources. It doesn’t have a big army. It doesn’t have vast reservoirs of funds that it can direct easily across the world.

Zakaria is famously a confidant of Obama’s, but there are limits to the horse manure even devoted courtiers swallow. Three years on, just one malign al-Qaeda progeny, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, now commands more territory than ever – from Aleppo in western Syria to the gates of Baghdad. It has all the tanks and weaponry abandoned by the Iraqi “army” we trained. It has control of the northern oil fields, the cash reserves of the second largest city in Iraq, and is now “the world’s richest terrorist group“.

Meanwhile, the White House has apparently canceled its cable subscription and daily newspaper. On Tuesday, as half-a-million Iraqis were fleeing Mosul, Administration flacks were talking up Hillary’s Greatest Hits:

Earnest was asked by a reporter at the daily press conference to describe Clinton’s accomplishments while she was Secretary of State.

“Ending the war in Iraq and winding down in a responsible fashion the war in Afghanistan, and doing that after the success of our our efforts to dismantle and destroyed Al-Qaida core that had established a base of operations in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Earnest answered.

Obama and Clinton ended the war in Iraq by losing it.They “pivoted” from Iraq to Afghanistan, and wound up losing both. Hillary crowed over Gaddafi’s corpse – “We came, we saw, he died” – and then sat by as her ambassador and best friend “Chris” was devoured by the mob: He died, she sat by, we’re gone. The Arab Spring that Zakaria claims “crippled” al-Qaeda delivered Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood and a military coup, Tunisia to soft Islamists, Libya to ever harder Islamists, and much of Syria and Iraq to jihadists too hardcore for “mainstream” al-Qaeda.

Events are moving fast on the ground. As I said on Fox News on Tuesday night:

In Iraq, the al Qaeda flag flies in Fallujah on buildings American troops built. And as we have just heard, al Qaeda has taken hold of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, earlier today. “

” In Dennis Sullivan’s photograph above, a landing craft from HMCS Prince Henry carries Canadian troops toward Juno Beach in the early hours of D-Day. Many years ago, I spoke to someone who’d been aboard the Prince Henry’s sister ship, HMCS Prince David, who talked about the subtly different dynamic among the guys on those landing craft. The Royal Canadian Navy men at the front are concerned to make their rendezvous on time: They’re in the middle of the mission, and they want to complete it. The infantrymen behind them are waiting for theirs to start. As the Prince Henry recedes behind them, they know they’re leaving the best-laid plans, and that what awaits them on shore is about to go agley.

A lot went wrong, but more went right – or was made right. A few hours before the Canadians aboard the Prince Henry climbed into that landing craft, 181 men in six Horsa gliders took off from RAF Tarrant Rushton in Dorset to take two bridges over the river Orne and hold them until reinforcements arrived. Their job was to prevent the Germans using the bridges to attack troops landing on Sword Beach. At lunchtime, Lord Lovat and his commandos arrived at the Bénouville Bridge, much to the relief of the 7th Parachute Battalion’s commanding officer, Major Pine-Coffin. That was his real name, and an amusing one back in Blighty: simple pine coffins are what soldiers get buried in. It wasn’t quite so funny in Normandy, where a lot of pine coffins would be needed by the end of the day. Lord Lovat, Chief of the Clan Fraser, apologized to Pine-Coffin for missing the rendezvous time: “Sorry, I’m a few minutes late,” he said, after a bloody firefight to take Sword Beach.

Lovat had asked his personal piper, Bill Millin, to pipe his men ashore. Private Millin pointed out that this would be in breach of War Office regulations. “That’s the English War Office, Bill,” said Lovat. “We’re Scotsmen.” And so Millin strolled up and down the sand amid the gunfire playing “Hieland Laddie” and “The Road To The Isles” and other highland favorites. The Germans are not big bagpipe fans and I doubt it added to their enjoyment of the day.”